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WASHINGTON — It will be about national security, about a just society, about reality, dreams, identity. It will be the 1960s, all over again.
Barack Obama, 46, and John McCain, 71, have launched two sharply contrasting and conflicting campaigns for the American presidency. Both will talk about the future, but both will also be reliving the past.
"We have two different styles, two different psychologies, two different world views, two different generational perspectives," observes Stanley Renshon, a political scientist and psychologist at City University of New York.
"Rarely have the differences been this stark."
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Much of the shape of the Democratic and Republican election campaigns is already apparent. Each candidate has already identified the other's weaknesses and, over the next five months, each will pound away at those weaknesses in commercials, in public appearances and online.
And as Prof. Renshon argues, each typifies one half of an argument that Americans had among themselves once before: during the height of flower power and the protests over the Vietnam War. In many ways, he believes, the election of 2008 revisits the ideological conflicts of the boomers' coming of age.
Starting out, Mr. McCain faces a single, frightening statistic: There has been a transformation in voter identification over the past year, and it threatens the Republicans with oblivion. The polling firm Rasmussen tracks party identification among voters on a monthly basis. The parties have usually been close: In June of 2005, for example, 35 per cent of voters identified themselves as Republicans and 36 per cent as Democrats, with the rest independents or unidentified. By June of 2007, the gap had widened, to 32 per cent Republican and 36 per cent Democrat.
This year, the gap has become a gulf.
For the past four months, the Democrats have polled at 41 per cent or above. This is the first time any party has polled above 39 per cent since Rasmussen began the survey four years ago. The Republicans are far behind, at 32 per cent.
"For the Republicans, it's devastating," CEO Scott Rasmussen said Friday in an interview. The Republicans are certain to lose seats in both the Senate and House of Representatives, he said.
"And at the presidential level, it means that all those people who were saying John McCain needs to reassure the base have to understand how much smaller the base is.
"He has to reach out beyond that base if he is to win the election."
And that's exactly what Mr. McCain intends to do.
His strategy is simple. He must make the election about only one key thing: national security. Every other issue — his domestic policies, the economy, his age, his health — must be pushed aside.
Already, Mr. McCain has taken to the airwaves with a commercial. "I'm running for president to keep the country I love safe," he tells voters, over sombre music. Mr. Obama, by implication would not.
(Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama have, by the way, vowed not to descend into the worst excesses of past campaigns. It is a promise that Republicans, especially, will find difficult to keep. Both sides will happily accuse the other of exaggerating, distorting, misrepresenting and generally misbehaving. But if the campaigns can avoid actual fabrications — known as swiftboating, after the mendacious accusation that 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was an unfit naval officer during the Vietnam War — then it will be a good day for American politics.) Mr. McCain does not need to win over every voter with his message; he may need only to win those white, working-class voters — many of them Democrats, many of them independents — who voted for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Michigan and other swing states.
"He must appeal to those voters that Hillary captured and Obama didn't as best he can," observes Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas in Austin. "And this he appears already to have started to try to do."
Indeed, Mr. McCain made exactly that pitch earlier this week.
